The unexplainable
In ideal conditions, the human intellect can explain anything, with one exception: it can't explain Everything.
There's nothing to relate it to, causally or otherwise. This is the intellect's limit.
Remember when you were young and you came across that question: if God created everything, what created God? That's it. It's the limit. You can't explain Everything.
A high percentage of philosophers throughout history failed to take that into consideration.
There's nothing to relate it to, causally or otherwise. This is the intellect's limit.
Remember when you were young and you came across that question: if God created everything, what created God? That's it. It's the limit. You can't explain Everything.
A high percentage of philosophers throughout history failed to take that into consideration.
Comments (102)
Dummies. :snicker:
1) how do you know that what you called Everything is really Everything,
2) how do you know that it exists,
3) how do you know that it is unexplainable,
4) and how do you know what you are talking about when you say Everything?
That's incorrect. I thought I'd never say that in my entire life! Danke for the opportunity, danke Herr Tate.
I think everything can be explained.
When is something explained? That is, what, at base, is it for something to have been explained?
It is for its occurrence or existence to require no further explanation. And that will happen when asking 'and why did that occur?' or 'why does that exist?' makes no sense and shows only a lack of understanding on the part of the questioner.
Well, why think that can't be true of every single occurrence and every single thing that exists?
"The less you think, the more you believe."---Richard Dawkins
That's not true either.
Some people will believe more if they think less, and some will believe less if they think less. And some who think a lot will believe more by virtue of having thought a lot, and some will believe less by virtue of having thought a lot.
Thinking often leads to belief, does it not?
What are these ideal conditions?
But what about other kinds of explanation?
Your ignorance (feigned or not) is stunning, kid. :smirk:
[quote=St. Anselm]For I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe that unless I believe I shall not understand.[/quote]
It's Dr Bartricks to you. Dad.
Neat. Not true, I would say. But sometimes I prefer neatness to truth. (That's a confession, not a boast.)
I'm trying to think of a kind of explanation that's not about relationships to other things.
Would breaking a thing down into parts and relating the parts to each other serve as an explanation?
This came from imagining that I'm talking to the human intellect. I asked if it's capable of explaining anything.
It said under ideal conditions, like if it's smart enough, has access to the right data, has peace and quiet to put it together (as opposed to having to struggle for safety in a war).
It's confident that in those conditions, there's nothing it can't explain.
Then I asked if it could explain Everything. It said I was talking about God as a symbol of the ultimate cause.
Contemporary philosophy doesnt look for first causes to explain Everything. They look for formal structures of becoming and transformation. Hegel was among those who started this trend with his dialectic of becoming.
It may be that the ideal conditions under which anything can be explained are not human conditions. We are limited animals who often go about unaware of their limits.
Wittgenstein warned that Heidegger was trying to do something that can't be done.
I think the intellect resists accepting any limits. The intellect says you'd have to have a vantage point beyond humanity to know that it's limited. I'm sure you recognize this as ponderings based on the Tractacus.
That is why the best philosophy retains a comic element.
Really? Can you find a quote for that?
I'll try. :grin:
Here's the quote:
Wittgenstein on Heidegger, from 1929:
I can very well think what Heidegger meant about Being and Angst. Man has the drive to run up against the boundaries of language. Think, for instance, of the astonishment that anything exists [das etwas existiert]. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer to it. All that we can say can only,a priori, be nonsense. Nevertheless we run up against the boundaries of language.
Kierkegaard also saw this running-up and similarly pointed it out (as running up against the paradox). This running up against the boundaries of language is Ethics.
I hold it certainly to be very important that one makes an end to all the chatter about ethics whether there can be knowledge in ethics, whether there are values [ob es Werte gebe , whether the Good can be defined, etc.
In ethics one always makes the attempt to say something which cannot concern and never concerns the essence of the matter. It is a priori certain: whatever one may give as a definition of the Good it is always only a misunderstanding to suppose that the expression corresponds to what one actually means (Moore). But the tendency to run up against shows something. The holy Augustine already knew this when he said: What, you scoundrel, you would speak no nonsense? Go ahead and speak nonsense it doesnt matter!"
Chesterton was a very glib, amusing fellow, and that sometimes makes his relentless special pleading nearly tolerable.
Quoting Tate
Heidegger also saw the boundaries of language as a problem for the articulation of being But it should be understood that what he saw language as standing in the way of was not an explanation of everything in the sense of capturing a world of things outside the bounds of human experience. The very idea of a concept of everything as all the furniture of the universe is what the grammatical structure of language imposes on us.
Subject-predicate propositional grammar uses the copula is as a neutral glue to force on us the idea of things as entities with intrinsic content. This is a chair. That is a mountain. Heidegger and Wittgenstein wanted to explain being in terms of becoming rather than interms imposed by the static is.
The reason we think we need a theory of everything is because of what Wittgenstein called our bewitchment by language.
Isn't that a commonplace?
Quoting Tate
We don't know what is the intellect's limit and thus there's no meaning talking about it.
Things like "God created everything, what created God?" are empty questions, anyway, since God is a human invention. So it depends what limits we have given and are giving to such an imaginary entity.
Quoting Tate
Why, do you know of any philosopher who has ever said that there's no limit in what we can know or that we can explain everything?
So he opted to express 'what it's like' from the first person view, right?
Quoting Joshs
From what vantage point are you making this observation? Where are you standing? How did you get there?
Quoting Joshs
Hegel already said that being is derivative of becoming. It's in P of the Spirit.
Thank you, Ludwig. You're probably right
For Heidegger, what its like means how it changes.
Quoting Tate
For a vantage with a particular history, which remakes itself in creating and recreating a stance. The standing of the stance isnt a fact but a performance.
Do you and your friends do this impromptu in the middle of the street sometimes?
Quoting Tate
I was in a philosophy meetup yesterday and the moderator insisted that I admit there are bald facts
about aspects of the world, and denying such concrete facts in the name of postmodernism or whatever is dangerous because it can lead to an anything goes atmosphere that breeds fascism. He pointed to the embrace of relativism by some Trump supporters. I told him Trump supporters were the complete opposite of relativists.
True. They do have an amazing capacity to ignore things though.
Well, any explanation relates something to something else - that's just how such discourse works. But "something else" doesn't always have to be something in the causal chain, or even something from the same category of things, such as explaining events in terms of other events or objects in terms of other objects. For example, a teleological explanation would relate events, actions, states of affairs to intents, goals, values.
Quoting Tate
Yes, that's a kind of explanation that we employ sometimes, isn't it?
Of course, any explanation could in turn be challenged, ad infinitum. But that's a rather obvious observation.
Yes. Will the intellect be satisfied with that kind of explanation, though?
I guess I'm saying that the intellect will feel stymied by being unable to specify a cause for everything.
I guess mapping could be a kind of explanation.
Quoting 180 Proof
Your intellect is the only part of you that can ponder whether it has limits. It's the only part that can reason out why there might be limits.
And the intellect says it might be in the same category as Everything in being unexplainable. It's not sure.
Any explanation will be a part of "everything", and can thus only be an explanation of some other part. To explain everything it would have to be able to (per impossible) incorporate an explanation of itself. Since that is impossible another explanation would be required, and so on ad infinitum. It is not a coherent question.
Was the moderator Jordan B Peterson?
:lol:
:smirk:
I agree. It's as if we are programmed to understand more more more. Enlarge the causal nexus, enlarge the domain of familiarity and mastery. Can't remember who (Sartre maybe?), but someone made the point that brute fact reveals our finitude as knowers, because it's something that happened to us, which makes no sense. Surely actual gods are spared that kind of embarrassment...
Why doesn't it make sense?
That which is by necessity causeless and eternal has no alternative but to be; no option; no opposite.
From a scientific perspective, explanations can never be true, they can only be unfalsified i.e. at best, scientific explanations (hypotheses/theories) are (only) assumed true until proven false. Since philosophy is abour truth, it looks like it has no links to science and explanations.
My two denarii.
Who needs a proof when one has found a truth?
Not that science can't confirm to satisfy our curiosity for a proof.
Is it? I thought philosophy's about folly (i.e. being unwise) how to reduce foolery, how to unlearn foolish habits. :chin:
I just mean that a brute fact is true for no reason. We can't deduce it from and therefore explain it with a theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute_fact
I take him to be talking about his vision of what philosophy ought be. One non-explaining activity of the philosopher is just that of calling attention to this or that aspect of world. It's way too easy for humans to talk nonsense, as long as they are all talking the same nonsense. For instance, there is a 'default' understanding of meaning that easily goes unquestioned, which is easily revealed to be silly if it's articulated (foregrounded, put under the lamp, pointed out.)
[quote = W's excellent little Blue Book]
If the meaning of the sign (roughly, that which is of importance about the sign) is an image built up in our minds when we see or hear the sign, then first let us adopt the method we just described of replacing this mental image by some outward object seen, e.g. a painted or modeled image. Then why should the written sign plus this painted image be alive if the written sign alone was dead? -- In fact, as soon as you think of replacing the mental image by, say, a painted one, and as soon as the image thereby loses its occult character, it ceased to seem to impart any life to the sentence at all.
[/quote]
:up:
An aspect of foolery/folie is believing in falsehoods, oui?
Proof, everyone needs it! At a bare minimum, evidence.
I think he's great, but his later work is fuzzy. As I said in another thread, Ryle's The Concept of Mind is close in concept and insight while being the opposite of fuzzy.
The 'problem' is that many philosophical superstitions are mostly harmless. Our tacit skill in applying concepts in ordinary life is insulated against bad theories of meaning. How do our errors get corrected then? Only by talking to others in the minority of people who take a genuine interest in 'dry' issues like the foundation of meaning or the best way to define science, etc.
What about the intellect, the ego (the "I"), and the self. Do you think they're explainable?
I think we can improve our grip on such concepts, and that one good approach to understanding the self or 'I' is to think of it as avatar on the 'stage' (sharing a public world) with other such avatars. For me, a key thing to note is that we are all keeping score. Those who 'cry wolf' become less trusted. We feel friendly toward and indebted to those who are kind to us. We don't pity as much the torturer on whom the tables have turned. This just scratches the surface. The point is that we are always tracking and scoring the avatars of one another. (I could more simply say that we are tracking one another, but the point is to shine a light on the self as a kind of central piece in a central human game.)
It's like bright without dim, left without right. If there was only one person, what need for saying 'I think X.' Or of saying 'it seems to me that X.'
As I see it, when I say 'as I see it,' I am politely acknowledging that I don't have to authority or certainty to grandly declare the way things simply are full stop. I offer a hypothesis that I am explicitly willing to revise as the conversation develops. If I say that I know something, that vaguely suggests my readiness to justify my authority to make such a claim according to the norms of the community we both belong to. For instance, mathematician might 'know' something is a theorem (is true) because he's familiar with the proof. Notice how we all know that we are all here together subject to various rules. From this perspective we can examine concepts like the self and knowledge in terms of moves in a social game.
All well said. But what about that perspective from which we see the self and knowledge as residents of a social complex: is this perspective the 'fool on the hill'? Who is it that stands apart to see this?
Isn't this view meaningful relative to the other one, where the self is independent? Are we explaining by comparing diverging narratives?
Man. Man has created god. Of course that presupposes that god did not create everything. Christians also believe god did not create everything. Christians don't believe God created Evil, yet Evil is part of everything. Duhh.
Philosophers ! I mean the 'serious' kind who labor together, subject to the norms of rationality, carefully building and testing the self-consciousness of the species. It's just us becoming more and more aware of ourselves in our talking about our talking about our talking. As Hegel might put, we little bald monkeys come and go, downloading the highlights of the conversation so far, maybe make a good point, and die. This conversation becomes more and more aware of itself as it continually moves to see itself from the outside, forever forging and extending its metacognitive vocabularies, making an otherwise necessary inheritance optional, sending out exploratory 'tentacles' (theories it's willing to drop if they don't live up to expectations), ...
For instance, I love this dude for making explicit the philosophical situation itself.
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/reason-in-philosophy-animating-ideas/
This, of all his books I've look at, is the fastest-moving most big-picture and dramatic presentation of ideas presented more technically elsewhere.
That's a lovely bit of writing. It does suggest a kind of progress (rather than an emerging truth) any further thoughts on this? Are we able to say the conversation becomes more useful over time?
Thanks! It seems the conversation and therefore/also its participants become richer and more complex, more self-referential, glutted like Shakespeare perhaps on the possibilities of personality. For me the key point is that we (as individuals) are each essentially 'us' as the inherited conversation, subject to its internal logic, appealing to its norms, talking and writing and performing its contingent signifiers.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/
https://iep.utm.edu/gadamer/#SH3a
[quote = Feurbach]
Philosophy presupposes nothing; this can only mean that it abstracts from all that is immediately or sensuously given, or from all objects distinguished from thought. In short, it abstracts from all wherefrom it is possible to abstract without ceasing to think, and it makes this act of abstraction from all objects its own beginning. However, what else is the absolute being if not the being for which nothing is to be presupposed and to which no object other than itself is either given or necessary?
[/quote]
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9752.12407
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/reason-in-philosophy-animating-ideas
:cool:
Maybe. How would we know this is what's happening? This is what irritates me about realism. It builds castles in the sky and hands them to you, so proud to have arrived at something possible, as if the mechanistic character of our present age ought to do the rest of the work.
Just venting.
A philosophy forum is not a bad place to start looking. The idea is to understand the meaning of concepts primarily through the way we offer and demand reasons, through the way we treat one another and explain ourselves to one another. 'I thought the light was green, officer.' Or 'I had a terrible headache' or 'I was under the impression that mushrooms were legal in Idaho.'
Again, I think this is more hypothesis than conclusion of an argument, isn't it?
I take what you mean, but I'd say it's both in that it's an hypothesis that's been argued for. Philosophy isn't math of course, so conclusions aren't theorems.
Amplifying, I think Wittgenstein (and not just him) already proved well enough that meaning is public, outside of and between individuals, not glowing in their pineal glands. But Philosophical Investigations, for all its ghostbusting, doesn't sketch much of a positive theory. As I understand it, Sellars' brilliant move was to see the practical/social primacy of humans making, challenging, and defending claims. A 'hanging' concept doesn't mean much apart from a complete thought/claim. Inferences are how we justify and challenge claims, how we explain ourselves and others, ...how claims relate to one another. So it makes sense to look how concepts work within/between claims as part of seeing them work between claimants.
A 'self' (to put it playfully) is something like a set of claims that ought to cohere. An 'object' is a set of claims that 'must' cohere (as in we can't make sense of a round square, while being all too familiar with humans who contradict themselves.)
If there's a claim, there's a claimant. Any psychological position you take, whether it's transcending society, transcending time, transcending Everything, it's all the self. You never get beyond it. Ego, maybe you can have a kind of vantage point on it, but that's apt to be a twin of the ego as opposed to a true transcendence, in other words, you see yourself by pretending to be someone else.
This same theme is there in the thread about solipsism. You're too easily laying out your externalism as an answer, as if you're critiquing a problem with internalism.
I say no, internalism and externalism are left and right, north and south, and they're both tools of the mind and self.
As Witt said, Everything is circumscribed by the subject.
What's that ? I can't hear you. And if I could, ....
Do you see how your reasoning aims beyond yourself towards me, attempting to bind me ?
"It's impossible for us to get beyond the self." The statement does what it says can't be done in the very saying of it.
Quoting Tate
Respectfully, that's just about antithetical to the way I understand Wittgenstein.
5.632 The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world.
--Tractacus
I know that line from his early work, and that's something we can talk about. But I'm especially coming from the point of view of his later work (PI and OC) (just to elucidate the 'antithetical' comment, not to end the discussion.)
I think it's probably a mistake to take Wittgenstein as advocating any particular metaphysics. I've been taking him as just exploring the mechanics of climbing the ladder.
To me, he destroys the theory that meaning is private (to name just one result.) I just happen to be interested in clarifying what it means to mean something, how we do and how we ought to settle beliefs, etc. The 'big' insight for me was something like the intrinsic publicity of meaning, what it means to be 'in' a language with others, the way that very notion of the 'I' is a token caught up in a public, worldly 'game.' I think the realization starts around Hegel, and its enemy or the superstition it opposes is the ghost story criticized by Ryle (and the later Wittgenstein.)
The subject and the ego (the "I") aren't the same. I take his use of "subject" to be Schopenhauerian. It's not a doctrine that it's the limit of the world. It obviously is. The point of that statement in the Tractacus was to point out why there is no theory of the subject.
Privacy isn't really an issue there either.
Correct me if I'm wrong. I was very passionate about the TLP once, but I haven't studied it recently.
Anything I can see, is not the I that sees it. Nor is anything the I can think the 'I' itself. The 'I' is like the field of vision, not an object in the field. Even the concept of the 'I' is never it. The 'I' is Sartre's nothingness, basically, a similar thought. We have almost a negative theology here.
How, then, did we ever come up with the concept/word 'I' ? What are its primary uses ?
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/#TranEgoDiscInte
Thanks.
It seems to me that 'I think' is an implicitly or explicitly added tag to whatever 'I' say. I could be weird and say that @Pie claims P. As I see it, it only makes sense to invent and track a self if there's a community who's keeping score. Of course we have individual bodies, but was it logically necessary to assign a single 'soul' or 'ghost' or 'tag' to each body ? This is another problem with Descartes. Why is it 'I' think rather than 'we' think or 'it' thinks ?
Sounds like you've got some identity issues.
Oh it's a good topic for humor, but your man Wittgenstein gave me the idea.
I speculate that it's just far more efficient to assign one 'player' to each body, more with the grain of our biology perhaps. It would be challenging as well to praise or rebuke (or marry or imprison) the correct 'player' if more than one locus of responsibility, one player, was associated with the same body.
In another passion (can't remember where), Wittgenstein discusses the idea of personalities as mere patterns of behavior, (understood to be) trading bodies. Descartes sought to be presuppositionless, but these examples show how difficult that is, how 'thrown' we are into inherited interpretive habits that we've never been able to question...not until a madman or a philosopher shows up and teaches us how. Perhaps it's like genetic mutation, almost always a bad thing, but sometimes lucky.
From my POV, it's on you to distinguish this 'limit' from a mere nothingness, a mere 'I think' tag that's added to every fact. As the self shrinks to a point without extension, to the mere field of vision itself, to some synonym for being itself, inexplicably flickering on a causal nexus it plays no role in?
Do you have a point of view? Or is it just the bewitchment of language that makes it seem so?
English is unusual in that it requires specifying pronouns. It's common for first, second, and third person identification to be embedded in verb usage, like "cogito."
The "I" is part of the very structure of human language. Just note what's going on when you try to say the "I" isn't necessary. You can't actually say that, as Witt would point out.
I agree with him that speaking of the subject, which I think is subtly different from the ego( maybe more primitive), is beyond the capacity of language. That doesn't make it nothing.
I have a point of view in the way that a bachelor is unmarried. This is how our ( public ) concepts work. I do not expect the arrival of a final word on this issue, but I'm currently unaware of a better approach than something like the following.
https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Texts/PreHegelian_Stages_in_the_History_of_the.pdf
Bodies are trained into such norms, into regarding the body as (belonging to, manifesting a ) self.
A self is the type of thing that can be held responsible.
Whether I claim to be a shit philosopher or not is up to me (I am held responsible for it), but what it means to be a shit philosopher is not up to me, because I don't govern the tribe's concepts. But we don't need to project them into eternity. Concepts are co-instituted and co-maintained, just as they are coperformed in the inferences we allow and disallow. That's what seems most reasonable to me currently.
The problem I see is that no one in particular is asserting this, so I have no context for interpretation.
How can there be such a thing as intention (not to mention intension) if there's no individual who thinks, feels, wants, questions, gets grumpy, etc.?
I'm dismayed. You seem to be responding to someone else. I do hold myself to the usual coherence norms, and I invite you to root out contradictions in my position. But let it be my position. Perhaps you can quote me. Show me where I deny the self, etc.
Oh, sorry. I misunderstood.
:up:
Sorry if I came off rude.
The idea is that we, as individual claim-making monkeys, run cultural software that includes the concept of the responsible self, easily but problematically imagined as a kind a ghost in the skull.
I don't claim to speak for Witt, but I am indeed pointing away from the ghost theory toward a linguistic theory, to how selves actually function, looking for the meaning of 'I' in its use by the tribe.
I see.
Don't know if you've been down Heidegger Road, but it seems that the ghost theory leads to a kind of shining void.
A tautology is.
There is there.
Or, another angle: